A recent This American Life series on school desegregation is making the rounds in education circles. Both segments, the latest of which aired this weekend, are worth a listen.

The series is nominally about segregation — "The Problem We All Live With," still. But though the phrase only appears twice in the show's transcripts, it's also about school choice. Both episodes spend much of their time examining different choice initiatives as communities try to integrate their schools voluntarily.

Can school choice provide a path to integration? It's complicated.  Photo: woodleywonderworks. Creative Commons.

The first installment focuses on a public-school transfer program in the St. Louis area, which allowed the mostly poor, mostly black students of struggling school districts (including the Normandy School District where Michael Brown graduated), to transfer into surrounding, wealthier districts. The second looks, among other things, at magnet school programs in Hartford, Conn.

As a result, the series raises some issues about what can be a fraught relationship between school choice and desegregation. A few thoughts:

1. I write about school choice, I work for a school choice organization, and my contact information is available online. As a result, I sometimes get calls from parents who are struggling to enroll their children in better schools. Nedra Martin, whose quest to find a new school for her daughter is at the center of the story of the Missouri transfer program, reminds me of them. She doesn't necessarily have a private school or a charter school in mind. She's looking for a better option. "I was at a point of desperation," she says, after learning that both private schools and transfers to other school districts would be out of reach. "We had to do better."  (more…)